Okay, first things first! Eventually, I'll get up a real button and I can stop bugging you guys, but if you can vote for me on Top Web Comics, that would be great! I'm doing pretty well, so thank you! And it's brought me a lot of new readers, so that's super cool :).
We're one page away from the end of this chapter! It's going to be 40 pages by tomorrow's page, which is 10 pages over my initial estimate. But hey, the extra pages ended up working out really well. Or rather, I'm bad at estimating exactly how many pages I'll need. I kept splitting things up so the dialog would be better dispersed! I really hate pages that are all garbled with endless word bubbles. Or word bubbles that are packed with like, two paragraphs of text. (As you can see, I'll never have that issue with Vincent. He's a very "five words or less" kind of guy.) I've also made the executive decision to combine chapter 6 with what I had planned for chapter 7. As I started nailing down more parts of the story in writing, I realized that chapter 6 would end up being very short by itself. Combining the two will make for one gigantic Godzilla-sized chapter, but it'll have a real arc to it as one unit, soooo oh well. And really, after chapter 6, I'm going to start looking into publishing options. That'll bring us to probably 175, 180 pages total, and a good stopping point before leading into the last half of the first part of the story. (This shit's going to go on for years, so don't worry about it. I have so many stories I haven't even gotten to hint at yet. Ugh somuchworkit'sfine.)
I am also almost almost done with the Chapter 6 cover, and I'm super jazzed about it. It might be the first thing I've made that has turned out the closest to what I saw in my head when I first set out to make it. (That's a hell of a sentence!) I've been posting my progress on Patreon if you're a $2 or more supporter...though I retooled a lot of it last night, and now it looks a lot different. Hm. I'll post it up there within the next couple days, and then I'll post it to this site and Deviantart on Monday. Yay, artwork!
Anyway, this page! More sibling banter, and Malaya is obviously the talker of this relationship. (Fun fact, in Filipino/Tagalog, "I love you" is "mahal kita". It's the general version, not the romantic version. Today you learned something!) Mal's feelings towards being a werewolf are obviously leaning more positive. (Hm, but for how long? >:D) Another fun fact is that Vincent's face is stupidly hard to draw!!! I'm not used to him yet. He's only popped up a few times so far, and my main goal was that he not look too similar to Elias. It's easy to just resign yourself to every character looking similar and calling it a stylistic choice, but at the end of the day, that's poor character design. Yes, drawing distinct-looking characters is harder and takes more practice, but in the end, it pays off. Though, I hate to say that I'm also kind of against the school of thought that all your characters should always look DRASTICALLY different. For a cartoon show, sure, but all I'm aiming for is that if you lined everyone up, they would look like humans of various sizes and builds.
Well, my brain is checking out fast today. A combination of allergies, general sleepiness lately, and a need for breakfast is fogging up my thinking O_O. I'm quickly coming to a point in the renovations on my old timey house where basically everything is going to get moved, dismantled, etc. The new floors are going in for almost half my house soon, which means...something almost like moving in again lol. And it took me 5 years to get this settled! But it'll be nice to have floors that are all one level. Some of the floor is subfloor, some of it's carpet...I could never have a Roomba unless it was like, an all-terrain Roomba. This place will be flat, but it's not flat right now for sure. That also means the kitchen is getting dismantled and renovated, sooooo I'm trying to save up the mental energy I'm going to need to prepare for all that. I'm not sure what the renovation is going to mean for this comic, though. Theoretically, my office area needs the least amount of work because there are already floors here. (Yay!) So hopefully, I'll get my shit together enough to get a few weeks ahead on the comic and all should be good. I'll keep everyone updated though. The house renovations have been in progress since before I was born, so 30+ years later, this shit is on the verge of getting done. It's like, replacing every major adult life event most people have, all at once! Other people get married and have kids...I finally get the floors done and the rest of the trimwork finished. Yessss.